Veni, Vidi, Scripsi

Well, they went for it. I was predicting against it due to the frenzy of bitterness left over from the Diablo III real money auction house fiasco, but it looks like there will be a PLEX-like item from Blizzard, as was previously brought up, that people can buy for real world money and then convert into in-game gold in World of Warcraft.

Current prices are ~800 million ISK in Jita

Called WoW Tokens, Blizzard will join the other games that have followed EVE Online and its PLEX model to help combat/sate the pressure some players feel is on them to buy the in-game currency in order to get what they want out of the game.

The WoW Token highway has no exit

While Blizzard is not the first to take their cue from CCP on this front, though they do appear to be one of the few, aside from SOE, to avoid a cute acronym. And even Krono (as in “Chrono” as in “Time”) strikes me as a bit cute. But for WoW it is just a token.

Avoiding a cuteness however is not the only thing that sets Blizzard apart on the PLEX-like front.

Process diagram

First off, the WoW Tokens are good for one sale and one sale only in-game. You cannot buy one from another player, then hang onto it until the market price goes up in order to resell. This avoids speculation and investment buyers that have been driving up the price of PLEX in EVE now and again.

Then there is the gold you get for your WoW Token. As World of Warcraft has over 500 servers outside of China the last time I looked, the market would seem to be fractured in the extreme. Yes, the more recent server pairings have reduced the effective number of servers by joining them in every way short of a full-on merger, there are still a lot of servers out there.

The Blizzard plan appears to be to join WoW Token sales into unified markets based on regions. These regions will be:

Americas, Australia, and New Zealand

Europe

Taiwan

Korea

China

This should prevent the low population server problem, like Daybreak has with their Krono, where prices can vary wildly because of demand on a given server.

Within these markets, you will get a price quote up front when you list your WoW Token for sale. I find this to be the most interesting bit, as within this special marketplace, it really looks like Blizzard wants to be able to inject gold into transactions to keep the market stable.

Blizzard is setting up a region-wide, cross server, cross faction market, with no fees, promising a specific amount of gold up front, and not necessarily matching up buyers and sellers directly the way it works in the auction house, all with an eye towards stopping illicit RMT. It does not seem like very much of a stretch for Blizzard to step in now and again and complete outstanding orders now and again when the buy and sell prices get out of alignment.

That makes complete sense if you view this as Blizzard attempting to apply a topical antibiotic to the festering sore that is illicit RMT. For this service to have any impact, it needs to feel like a viable alternative to the gold sellers. So I suspect that, when this service goes live, you may end up buying a bit of your gold directly from Blizzard. I suspect somebody diligent like Gevlon will watch this market and will be able to “prove” at some point that Blizz is kicking in some gold now and again.

All that is left is to set the price of a WoW Token. Blizzard has left that in the TBD file, but the price has to be more than $14.99 to cover the additional overhead that this program will entail, but I doubt the price can exceed $19.99 per token if Blizzard wants it to succeed.

And then we will have to see what the in-game market will bear. A quick Google search shows gold sellers going down to fifty cents per 1,000 gold. Now Blizzard doesn’t have to match that price, since they offer a safe and legitimate method of buying WoW gold, but they can’t be off by a huge factor either. So I couldn’t see a WoW Token for selling for less than 30K gold given a high estimate price of $19.99 per token.

Which doesn’t seem that bad I guess. Blizz might not even have to get into the price support business to aggressively at that level of pricing. But how that will play out in the longer term will be interesting to watch.

And, of course, this being a WoW related topic, lots others have opinions. It is big enough news that my wife caught it on a Yahoo headline. A few posts from the local blogesphere you might care to peruse:

We came up short as a group in Azeroth this past weekend. Life will get in the way and the whole group has gotten older over the last eight years we have played. But three of us, Potshot, Ula, and myself were online. We got on Skype together as we went about doing some garrison things and quests and what not. Blizzard has made “soloing in a group” work a bit better over the years, but sometimes it still feels like the optimum open world group size is one.

Potshot and Ula were off on a quest chain to unlock a garrison upgrade while I was running around Azeroth visiting elders for the Lunar Festival. I was sparked into late action on that when I read that 40 tokens from elders will buy you a 60 to 90 heirloom armor upgrade as part of the whole new heirloom system that came in with patch 6.1.

Blizzard has found a way to get me to do holiday events again, gotta give them that.

Anyway, as we were off on our tasks, we started talking about the possibilities of the EverQuest progression server that may (or may not) be showing up at some future date.

Potshot and I are pretty much on board for it… same as it ever was. We will be there for the dawn of whatever new server they put together. We also sold Ula on the idea for the moment of going back in time to a world of simple graphics, bad linoleum textures, and limited skills and spells.

Bandit fight in West Karana

Depending on when (and if) Daybreak gets this going, a progression server excursion might make a nice break from Azeroth for a bit. I would call it a hiatus, but I think we would need to play more to qualify for the term.

On conversation meandered about on the idea of EverQuest nostalgia and then I started to compare old EverQuest to EverQuest II, which in many ways seems to be almost the antithesis of EverQuest, at least when comparing the early versions of both.

At what point in EQ did you need 3 full hotbars?

Of course that made its way around in my mind to what an EverQuest II progression server would be like. How do you take what there is out there today, the game having just hit the 10 year mark back in November, and recreate the 2004 experience?

My earliest screen shot of EQ2 – Nov. 14, 2004

Even the EverQuest II team, during their recent “Don’t go, we’re still alive!” live stream the other day spoke of a desire to do something like a progression server for EverQuest II, if they could figure out how.

And therein lies the rub.

I must assume that the EverQuest II team is stuck with the same restrictions that the EverQuest team faces when doing progression servers, which means working with the current client and server and zones and just playing with some of the flags and settings in the background.

In this EverQuest has a clear advantage in that SOE hasn’t spent a ton of time going back and revamping old zones. Yes, they redid Freeport and the Commonlands and the Desert of Ro, for which they will spend time in purgatory I am sure, but a lot of the old zones are still the same ugly ass stuff we thought was the bees knees back in 1999. This is why I always roll on the Qeynos side of Norrath.

Qeynos… at night!

SOE added a lot of stuff to EverQuest, including a starting tutorial and some new starter zones, but they left a lot of the old stuff intact. Camping bandits in West Karana in 2011 was very much like camping them in 1999.

We’re hunting bandits

EverQuest was ever looking forward to the next expansion, the next round of content, then next increase in the level cap, the next pack of AA skills. It isn’t like it launched perfectly. There were many problems, some of which took years to fix. But the team seemed to have their eyes constantly on the horizon as they chased a crazy two expansions a year dream, which ran unbroken for a five year stretch of time, from Legacy of Ykesha to Secrets of Faydwer. Success allowed that.

Meanwhile, EverQuest II has spent a lot of its first decade trying to fix, change, or simply forget about what the game was like at launch. There have been a lot of revamps of game mechanics, as there have been with EverQuest.

But the EverQuest II team has also spent a lot of time going back to the original content to change and update things. Qeynos and Freeport have been changed and revamped and updated to the point that it is difficult to compare the 2004 versions with the what is there now. There is no Isle of Refuge on which to start anymore… unless you want to run around your own version… and I am not even sure you can still get to the swamp where that first screen shot above was taken.

And zones that made a huge impact on me back in the day, like the Thundering Steppes or Nektulos Forest, have been changed so much over the years that they hardly feel like the same places.

Remember when centaurs were all group encounters?

Given all of the changes that have rolled back over the original game over the years, I am not sure that much of 2004 can be really recreated given the limitations that the EverQuest II team will face. They are not going to be allowed to roll a special client or a special version of the server software, which leaves us with what?

I suppose there would be some interest, some value, some fun to be had in simply rolling up a fresh EverQuest II server that required Station Access or SOE All Access or Daybreak to Dusk Access or whatever the all-in-one only subscription option will be called some day, starting with just the original zones, and then not allowing transfers or level 90 character boosts. Maybe they could tinker with the experience table or toughen up the mobs a bit. It could be a hardcore or challenge server maybe. But I bet it would be tough to justify keeping the cash shop limited, especially if it turned out that the people who jumped on that server were subscribers already. Siphoning your most dedicated players off to their own isolated server can’t be viewed as a win in accounting.

So where does that leave us? Back with the status quo?

Of course, it is also reasonable to ask about how much nostalgia there is for the early days of EverQuest II. In many ways 2004 in Norrath feels like a survivors tale of horrible ideas we’re all pretty much glad we no longer have to deal with. Is any significant population of players really longing to go back to early days of the game?

There is an EverQuest II emulator project out there, but it doesn’t seem to generate anywhere close to the amount of interest that classic EverQuest or World of Warcraft or even Star Wars Galaxies server emulation does.

The cliche response is always that you can’t go home again, but in this case, do we even want to?

I did have my first failure of my current Rube Goldberg MMO blogesphere feed this month when somebody decided that Pinboard, a key player in the chain of events that moves things from my Feedly feed to the sidebar of this blog, was picked to receive a DDoS attack for a couple of days.

Fortunately things came back together in a couple of days, but for a while there the side bar was back to depending solely on the VirginWorlds feed for links to posts on other blogs.

And then VirginWorlds feed started to have some problems. I think there is an RSS problem in one of the blogs on Brent’s list, which is causing only a few sites to get picked up. Plus Massively is no longer updating, long a staple of his feed. And then another site on his list became a spam site and some odd things started showing up in the feed, so I took it off the side bar and dropped Brent a note. We’ll see how that plays out.

In World of Warcraft, the instance group got as far as Zul’Farrak in our horde adventures, though we were still forgetting we could use the Dungeon Finder. Otherwise we were running around doing holiday events and the like.

Oh, the Dungeon Finder. My first runs with that were… not so good. I seemed to run into some cliche bad groups.

Meanwhile, WoW decided to emulate WebKinz and start selling stuffed animals that had codes for in-game versions. They are still around. My daughter wants the Windrider Cub.

The Azeroth Advisor went buh-bye. Thanks 38 Studios! I saved all the email tips they sent me, however they are all pretty much worthless post-Cataclysm.

I started off somewhat active in New Eden. There was a reavers operation going on in Period Basis, and those are always good for me because you can drop in at just about any hour of the day and find something going on. Granted, “something” generally means shooting a structure, but that something is better than nothing. And I can always tab out and do pet battles in WoW if there is no opposition. But then that op wrapped up and there hasn’t been much else going on that I have been able to get to.

World of Warcraft

There are days when I feel like I am stuck in my garrison. With five garrisons running, there are evenings when my play time is just about exhausted when I have finally done every little thing in every garrison and whatever daily quest and the daily pet battles and checking the auction house.

Coming Up

I actually have a couple of outstanding posts I haven’t gotten to yet. That is “outstanding” as in “on my list of things to do” and not a measure of their quality. The instance group went and ran the Iron Docks… like four times. I just haven’t gotten around to putting that post together.

I also have a list of things to write about when it comes to WoW Patch 6.1.

There is another EVE Online expansion coming along, because every five weeks is the way they roll.

A couple of Kickstarter campaigns will be wrapping up, so there will be some dollar totals to write about. And I am sure there will be something new on Daybreak front to talk about.

I am also waiting for Raptr to send out their 2014 game play summaries, so I can see where I wasted my time last year. It is, frankly, one of the few reasons I still run Raptr.

Otherwise it will be March and something about a salt marsh harvest mouse. There was so much going on in February, maybe things will just take it easy in March.

In a world where there was no Star Trek, what becomes of the post-Trek cultural artifacts that range from Galaxy Quest to The Big Bang Theory to catch phrases to television tropes to William Shatner doing Priceline.com commercials? He’s not getting that gig because of T. J. Hooker or that one episode of The Twilight Zone.

What does the world look like without Star Trek’s influence?

I know, Star Trek feels dated.

The pilot for the original series was done and rejected before I was even born. The series itself had run its three seasons and was cancelled before I even old enough to know it was a thing.

But then, somehow, it stayed alive. It ran, and remained popular, in syndication for years and year. I and millions of others watch those re-runs and the follow on animated series. Before Star Wars could have an expanded universe there was already a pile of Star Trek novels available. There were models and costumes and board games and books just about the phenomena that was Star Trek. There was even a store over at the San Antonio shopping center at one point called Starbase One or some such. It sold other science fiction stuff. You could find a battery powered Robby the Robot or a model of an Eagle from Space 1999 or a few Lost in Space related items, but most of the place was just stacked up with Star Trek related items.

There was a time when having a store dedicated to Star Trek seemed like a sound business decision. And I used to just nerd out in there when I wasn’t over at the Hobby Shop.

Star Trek was a big freakin’ deal. And it was cemented into my consciousness before Star Wars or Battlestar Galactica or Alien or any number of other science fiction franchises.

It wasn’t high art. The original series could be groan inducingly bad at times. The third season especially seemed to have trouble finding decent scripts. And it hasn’t aged very well. It feels awkward and self-conscious today.

But at the time it filled a need. It was water on a desert. It was optimistic and hopeful and showed us a future that looked pretty damn cool. I wanted to be on the Enterprise, to be a part of that crew.

And the cornerstone of that crew was the half human, half Vulcan Mr. Spock. I do not think Star Trek works without him and his exotic look and pointy ears and oddly compelling logical view of the universe. Yes, sometimes emotion would win out, but only when it was logical for it to do so. No character so well defined the series (or was so completely abused in the subsequent flood of novels) than Mr. Spock.

I remember once, back in the early 90s, explaining to a co-worker about Star Trek. She grew up overseas and emigrated to the United States as a graduate student and then stayed on, marrying a fellow immigrant and settling down in Silicon Valley. She was (and remains) very smart and was interested in various cultural things. One day we were giving the Live Long and Prosper sign in the lab and she wanted to know about it.

So I gave her a little background on Star Trek and then tried to help her get her hand to do the sign, which she couldn’t quite manage. Then her husband showed up to pick her up on the way home from his job, and when he walked into the room I turned to him and gave him the sign… and he put his hand up and returned it, causing his wife to boggle in disbelief. She practically shouted the question, “How do you know that?” It was a beautiful moment.

Being able to do that was the universal nerd secret handshake and high sign at the time. If you were in the club, you practiced making that sign until you could do it without hesitation. And if you couldn’t do it, you weren’t in the goddam club. But he was in the club. We were all in the club around those parts.

Live long and prosper

I know that this is a bunch of silly, half thought through, semi-connected statements, but it represents the rush of emotion that ran through my brain when I read today that Leonard Nimoy had passed away at age 83. He and his character were an unreasonably big part of my early life.

And I know he was more than just Mr. Spock, that he played more roles and had a wider range of interests and a life outside of all of that.

But Mr. Spock was important to us and he got that and he played the role long after many people would have tired of the whole thing because he got how important it was. And through that he will have achieved a sort of immortality. Mr. Spock lives on.

At some point while I slept the Crowfall Kickstarter campaign crossed the $800,000 mark, which means that if you don’t reneg on that bid you made in the next 26 days or so, you’ll end up having to pay them some money.

So we’re done, right? Of course not!

The marketing aspect of this campaign has only just begun, plus more money is always good. Any detail oriented person probably noticed, it says right on the Kickstarter page itself that you cannot make an MMO for $800K.

So where will this campaign head?

I could see the Crowfall campaign hitting the $2 million mark, which would allow it to finish up in the neighborhood of titles like Camelot Unchained, Shroud of the Avatar, and Star Citizen.

Of those campaigns, this one feels the most like Shroud of the Avatar at least superficially. Lord British asked for one million dollars, hit that at the 10 day mark, and then went on secure just over two million in funding.

The Crowfall team has 26 days left to go raise another $1.2 million and hit that respectable mark. And they can do it, if they can negotiate the mid-campaign doldrums.

Wait, you never said anything about doldrums!

If you look at the charts at Kicktraq, the amount of money raised and the number of new backers signing up is dropping off day by day. The early rush of enthusiasm is over. The pent up and eager backers are already on board. In about a week it is going to get very quiet on the campaign if they don’t have a plan. To progress further they have to capture the fence sitters and the unaware while continuing to engage their core supported.

On top of that, they have already met their goal, so the tension on that front is over. This campaign will fund (barring any mass defection) so there is no need to rush out to pledge or up the ante on what you have already opted to give.

To catch the unaware will require more press coverage. But more of the same “hey, look, a game” sorts of stories probably won’t cut it. The campaign will need something that will attract fresh eyes. I am not sure that the Lord British tactic of getting out on the stump and telling people that most game designers suck compared to him (and then claiming he was taken out of context) is necessarily the right route to take. After all, Lord British has spent years laying the foundation of being an erratic nut case when it comes to talking to the press. You can’t just get that reputation in a day.

What I expect we will see in the next week or two is a few interviews where Gordon Walton or J. Todd Coleman offer to dish the dirt on what REALLY went wrong with Shadowbane or The Sims Online or Star Wars: The Old Republic. We love that sort of thing. You can bet we’ll be blogging about that if it comes up, because a good interview on that front will echo all over the place. Admissions of failure play very well to a wider audience. And such tales can easily be turned to teaching moments about how much they learned and how the Crowfall plan has taken those lessons to heart.

Meanwhile, there are those fence sitters and those who have already pledged. There are all sorts of ways to entice them to get on the bus and then give even more money.

One way is stretch goals. And, frankly, the current stretch goals stink in my opinion. You are never going to convince me that they weren’t going to do both anyway. But that is the problem when you present a tight plan, anything you suggest seems either tacked on or was assumed to be part of the plan anyway. I don’t know how they are going to do it, but they need to step up their game on that front. Yeah, you want to hold off on the really good stretch goals until the very end to help drive that last 48 hour push, but right now they aren’t playing for me.

But more importantly, they need to tinker with the pledge tiers. People who were in at the start will up their game if a new tier with a special shiny shows up, while those on the fence may be swayed by a tier that gives them just the right mix of things. Expect a regular re-rolling of new tiers as they seek out sweet spots and special deals that will bring in more money.

And I expect that they will open up pledges via PayPal and other sources on their own site for people who do not want to use the Amazon funding system that Kickstarter rests on.

Color me surprised. I mentioned EverQuest and progression servers at the top of the week, then left that behind, expecting to hear no more about it for many months, thinking on the Galactic Student Council and the Crowfall Kickstarter campaign and the WoW 6.1 patch and other more current items. Plenty of time for these things before EverQuest news shows up again. There isn’t even a community team left to put our EverQuest news, is there?

And then I saw this tweet from Holly “Windstalking” Longdale, now executive producer of both EverQuest and EverQuest II, last night.

Sure enough, the link to the EverQuest forums resolves to an actual post talking about proposed progression server models. That is like moving at light speed for the organization formerly known as SOE.

The forum post explores four potential progression server models they might pursue, and I am going to copy the text for each wholesale here because you just KNOW that this company change is going to end up with another revamp of the forums and the inevitable loss of old posts.

The proposed models are:

1. Existing rules – A restart of what we have on Fippy Darkpaw

Server starts with only the original EverQuest zones active. Players start at level 1.

When players kill a set of predefined targets, a two-month countdown timer starts. There is a three-month timer before Kunark and Velious can unlock.

When the timer is complete, a two-week vote starts that will enable the next expansion. If the majority chooses ‘yes,’ the expansion unlocks at the end of the voting period. If the majority chooses ‘no,’ a new vote begins immediately.

This progression can continue until the server is no longer able to defeat raid targets or until it catches up with live servers.

2. Slower progression – Fippy taking it easy

Server starts with only the original EverQuest zones active. Players start at level 1.

When players kill a set of predefined targets, a three-plus month countdown timer starts.

When the timer is complete, a two-week vote starts. If the majority chooses ‘yes,’ the expansion unlocks at the end of the voting period. If the majority chooses ‘no,’ a new vote begins immediately.

This progression can continue until the server is no longer able to defeat raid targets or until it catches up with live servers.

Server starts with only the original EverQuest zones active. Players start at level 1.

When players kill a set of predefined targets, a two-month countdown timer starts. There is a three-month timer before Kunark and Velious can unlock.

OPTION: When the timer is complete, a two-week vote starts that will enable the next expansion. If the majority chooses ‘yes,’ the expansion unlocks at the end of the voting period. If the majority chooses ‘no,’ a new vote begins immediately.

OPTION: Dev determines the unlocked progression based on the player completion rates.

At a specific point, determined by Dev, votes are no longer available and progression is complete.

4. Seasonal Challenge Server – Constantly refreshing Fippy

The server starts with only original EverQuest zones active, or with content enabled through a later expansion. Players start at level 1.

OPTION: When players kill a set of predefined targets, a vote begins within a week. Each vote lasts two weeks. If the majority chooses ‘yes,’ the expansion unlocks at the end of the voting period. If the majority chooses ‘no,’ a new vote begins immediately.

OPTION: Alternatively, Dev may choose to unlock content when progression targets are complete.

Players have a set period of time (one season) to complete as much content as they can. The player(s) who get the farthest will receive recognition and a prize (to be determined later).

Once the season is complete, the server is reset and the challenge begins anew!

Of those four, I would be happy enough to see any of the first three, as they contain what I consider the key element of fun/interest for me, which is everybody starting together at level one in the old content. Honestly, once the game gets past Ruins of Kunark, my interest starts to fade, so slowing things down a bit or not holding out until the bitter end of the last expansion before syncing up with the live servers makes sense to me.

Not that the fourth option doesn’t sound interesting. That might be the old school raider progression vehicle of choice, with a constant stream of raiding goals and prizes and what not. I just wonder how that will play out given how raiders behave every single time there are contested open world raids. Because once the GMs have to get involved and make a schedule (or start their own fight club) somebody else is controlling the flow. Don’t try to tell me it will be different THIS time, because it won’t.

Not that I would even be able to get into the raiding bit. And I must admit that a server that basically pwipes at intervals and starts everybody back at level 1 again has a certain appeal. Some of my best times on TorilMUD were at pwipes. That would essentially replay what I consider the best part of the whole thing over and over, like some demented shared Norrathian version of the movie Groundhog Day.

The problem is that I do get attached to my characters. I like to see them progress. And even when they don’t get very far, I like that they at least made SOME progress and got to KEEP that progress in anticipation of my return. For me it starts to get into the “death or rebirth?” discussion, and having that happen at regular, and presumably short, might end up wearing me down. Or it might let me jump on the ride when it starts up again. I am not sure.

Anyway, as mentioned in the forum post, there is a poll up in EverQuest currently that allows you to vote on which of the formats you might prefer. I actually got out the EverQuest client and pushed the button for one of the options.

Progression Server Polling…

The poll itself had some trouble recording my vote because… well… EverQuest polling is like that. See the forum thread related to any Fippy Darkpaw expansion unlock vote, there is always a few people who are not able to vote because the client is just not feeling it at that moment.

Of course this might all be for naught, at least if the discussion in the general channel on the Vox server is any sort of barometer of player sentiment. After I voted I watched a stream of vitriol about the whole progression server idea flow past in text form. I would politely sum up the general sentiment I saw as, “Progression servers just steal players and developer resources from the real game and nobody wants to go play the 1999 version anyway because it was horrible.”

Meanwhile, all is not peaches and cream in the progression server sub forum either, where vocal members of the various factions that haunt that section are calling for any number of impractical or unlikely suggestions that have piled up over the years.

We shall see how this plays out. This could mean that DGC might roll out some new form of progression server in time to take up the slack of the summer hiatus. Or the whole thing might just fall down a well, never to be heard from again.

What kind of progression server would you like to see? Or is that even your thing?

Also, if you want to see the progression of the Fippy Darkpaw server up through July of last year, when the vote to unlock the Underfoot expansion failed, you can find it all summed up here.

I went with the Galactic Student Council metaphor just about seven years ago when the EVE Online Council of Stellar Management ran its first election. And here we are today with the election of the 10th council kicking off. (The whole thing started off with six month terms, which is how we got ten in seven years.)

There are 75 candidates out there vying for 14 spots and several bloggers have attempted to cover the candidates in order to give us some insight as to who stands for what as well as broader stroke views of the election itself. Now, as polls have opened, people are posting their endorsements.

And I am still sticking with the Galactic Student Council metaphor.

That metaphor isn’t meant to denigrate any of the effort that those elected have put in during the past or plan to put in during the future. Those that get elected are for the most part honest, forthright, and hard working, and CCP ought to feel lucky to have them.

And it doesn’t mean that I won’t vote. I will likely vote the straight CFC party ticket, though I’d vote for Sion and Endie regardless. Frankly I can’t wait for Endie on the CSM. He wields metaphor like somebody wielding… a thingy… very deftly… or something. I envy his way with words. And people like Sugar Kyle and Steve Ronuken are on the CFC ticket, though I might bump them up the list. And I want competent people around so when CCP deigns to ask their advice, so they get a good response.

No, that metaphor is a poke at CCP. The CSM is a creature of CCP’s own making. They control it and within the bounds of its work the CSM only has exactly as much power and influence as CCP allows it. CSM members can have real power, but that power really only exists when they take things out of school, as happened with Incarna or the bonus room, neither of which were happy, comfortable moments for CCP. That is clearly not the CSM CCP dreams of. And the stink coming from behind the curtains of CSM9, where CCP basically refused to deal with an elected candidate, but wouldn’t remove him or own up to the situation, just makes me roll my eyes. If you want to pick and choose who you deal with, then don’t go through the pretense of elections.

Anyway, like a minority of EVE Online players out there, I will go cast my vote. I will also happily collect my “so you’re still subscribed” free blueprints for a special shuttle and my “please vote, we’ll give you some goodies” collectables. All the details are here on how and when to vote and what prizes you get.

Diplomatic Shuttle… Caroline’s Star not included.

And then the election will be over, the new CSM will be announced, and the whole thing will go into the background… or even more so into the background… for most players.

I sort of pay attention to what is going on and I would find it hard to pick out the right candidates out of a list of 75… how can we be sure all these people are running for the right reasons… and as amusing as I would find it to inflict former CFC member (elapsed time as in GSF, ~8 minutes) Xenuria on CCP for a year, I do want somebody I think I can trust around when the time comes.

So if you want help figuring out who to vote for, there are plenty of suggested ballots out there, often with detailed reasons why you should select a given candidate. Here are a few: